Chris Quinn: More from April and Gen Con

The day started with a Crimson Codex RPGA adventure. The module is set on Xen’drik continent in the world of Eberron. It was fun even though the players were partially successful in the module.

Afterward, I was called upon to escort an Austin Gen Con newbie to the Exhibitors Hall. She was overwhelmed by its size. The Exhibitors Hall contains hundreds of venders, dealers and artists in area over 3 times the size of football field.

After the run, we got food at the small (but expensive) food court in the convention center. I would have shown her other nearby places, but she was press for time.

Next, I started running the RPGA 20-minutes Dungeon Delve. For the event, a group of six players has twenty minutes to defeat three encounters. The maps and encounters are random. You get one to five tokens base on how far the party reaches in the small dungeon. The token scale is one for entering dungeon, one for defeating the first encounter, one for defeating the second encounter and two for the last encounter.

You trade the tokens for Wizard of the Coast (WOTC) promotional items such as dice, figures, D&D satchel’s, campaign cards and Greyhawk regional shields.

I went back to my hotel to drop my D&D books and pick up my True Dungeon equipment tokens. From the hotel, I preceded to the True Dungeon Tavern to exchange set tokens for one of their special Gen Con only tokens.

At 6:30 p.m., I race back to Sagamore Hall for WOTC’s big announcement. Before the presentation WOTC gave away promotional D&D tee-shirts and D&D flash drives.

The company did present a good “dog and pony” show for the announcement of the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Afterwards there was plenty of WOTC staff around to answer questions.

My shift at the Gen Con Auction was from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The Gen Con Auction is long standing tradition at the convention. Anyone attending Gen Con can submit items to be auction off on stage or in the auction store. Tonight my position was stage writer. The stage writer records the bidder number and the final bid on the item tag.

The highlight of the day was True Dungeon event. My party met early at 9:15 p.m. for our 9:50 p.m. run. Everyone checks to make sure they had the right equipment tokens. We also sorted the “free” bag of token that comes with the True Dungeon event ticket.

At about 15 minutes before the start of the event, we sat down at the waiting table for 9:50 p.m. run and went through the rules looking for any last minute changes.

The True Dungeon was running a little late, so some of us started practicing on the combat shuffle board.

The first part of the event is training in your class. All of the spell casters need to learn for symbols for their class (cleric prayer beads, wizard cosmology diagram, druid nature items, etc). Combat types (barbarian, ranger, and warrior) get tips and training on the combat shuffle board. Rogue gets to practice disarming traps. I was able to quickly train with wizard cosmology diagram and then help the bard train in the class knowledge symbols.

Our route through the True Dungeon was “combat.” So there was be a tap more combats than puzzles. We were successful in all the rooms but one. In the end, all of our party survived the Dungeon :-).

It was after midnight when I started back to my hotel. The convention center was still open and people still playing pick up games. For me, it was time to sleep.